Walk the Line

“Not since John the Baptist has there been a voice like that crying in the wilderness…” – Bono

“How well I have learned that there is no fence between heaven and hell.” - Johnny Cash

From his childhood Johnny Cash knew music as a balm and a channel. While his older brother Jack dreamed of becoming a preacher, Johnny’s dreams were of music. With music he could reach out to the disenfranchised and the outcast. Growing up dirt poor on a farm in America’s South, Johnny Cash learned of suffering and hardship from an early age. And throughout his tumultuous life his attitude to life’s sorrows and regrets set him apart as a musician and a man. Walk the Line, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as Cash, traces the life of the ‘Man in Black’ from his tough upbringing to his rise to fame.

After tinkering with less than heartfelt gospel tunes, Johnny Cash got his break with a new style of music. Featuring driving guitar and his raw, gutsy voice, his music told stories of people on the fringes of society. His lyrics resonated with those to whom popular music had little to say. But it was his intense performances that saw him catapulted into stardom. Touring with fellow up-and-comers Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley, Cash befriended the sassy stage veteran June Carter (Reese Witherspoon).

Fame and fortune are rarely achieved without some sort of cost. And as Cash spent months at a time touring and performing, his wife, Vivian, remained at home raising their four daughters. Cash’s addiction to amphetamines and the behaviour that resulted together with his infatuation with June Carter made salvaging their marriage an almost impossible task.

It is his relationship with June that forms the focus of the film. According to Walk the Line, she is - for Cash - a figure of salvation. Something of a muse, she also stood by him as he struggled with his addiction.

Some seven years in development, Walk the Line, was made with the blessing of both Johnny and June Carter Cash before their deaths in 2003. It is based largely on Cash’s books Man in Black and Cash The Autobiography. Yet this biopic suffers the same perils as every other in the genre. A life cannot effectively or easily be translated to screen; details are changed, events abbreviated, relationships simplified and people altered or left out altogether.

While the depiction of both Cash’s father and his first wife may be the obvious oversimplifications, the most significant alteration is the minimising of Cash’s faith. A man with a profound conviction of his salvation through Christ, Johnny Cash grappled with belief and sin but ultimately believed that God’s hand was never off him. U2’s Bono observed that Cash did not sing to the damned, but with the damned. A man who identified himself with the Apostle Paul, Cash saw himself as the “worst of sinners”, as one in need of redemption and one who received it.

Such things are hard to understand, harder still to depict on screen. There are brief references to Cash’s recommitment to God, to the role of God in his battle with addiction, but it is June who is largely credited with his recovery.

With a compelling script, searing performances (Witherspoon and Phoenix perform their own songs) and a powerful story, Walk the Line is remarkable tale of love and redemption. 

We live in age of celebrity and gloss; where music making is akin to manufacturing; where bland popettes sing anodyne songs about nothing or angry young men sing angry lyrics about injustice while they luxuriate in their new found wealth. In such a context Johnny Cash is an enigma and a revelation. His fame was about the music, the driving tunes, the raw, gut-twisting lyrics; that is what drew people to Cash. Not the work of a PR exec churning out media releases or mindless film clips. But more than that he was a man who reached out to people through his music, who sought to share his liberation with others not because he was better than they but because he never forgot what it was to need forgiveness.

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